Search Query Analysis to Increase eCommerce Website Conversions

I frequently see many people within our industry writing about the next Google zoo animal update, high quality content, SEO is dead, importance of social media marketing, and so forth. However, one aspect of internet marketing that is equally important is data driven search query analysis for eCommerce SEO campaigns.

Chances are if you know a thing or two about SEO or PPC, you should be getting some targeted traffic. To truly succeed online, you must focus your efforts on converting this traffic into sales.

I will assume if you are this far in your journey to becoming more profitable than ever, you have already worked out user experience aspects of your website, have ample trust symbols, A/B tested your shopping cart funnel, tested offers such as free shipping vs. price discounts, etc.

Expecting traffic to convert automatically is a sheer roll of the dice and is something I see done all too often. Why spend your hard earned dollars on SEO, if you’re not going to reap the maximum benefit of such a valuable asset?

In this post, we will review a fresh case study on how we increased conversion rates via data driven search query analysis techniques in record time.

Data Driven Search Query Analysis to Increase Conversion Rates

Many companies will believe they achieved something great once they rank your website, but not caring about your conversion rates is not caring about your business. Constantly striving to increase your conversion rates is something that will yield the largest ROI in terms of monetizing from your traffic, whether paid or organic.

Let’s get into the juicy details.

With data driven search query analysis, we were able to bring 248 conversions to a whopping 369 conversions. We’re not talking about selling coffee mugs. The industry is HVAC & the location of our client is in Fort Lauderdale, FL with their average sale being over $1,500.00.

So how did we manage to increase this websites conversion rates to 48.79% within 2 months?

Data Driven Search Query Analysis for SEO

First, forget about the broad keywords that every business in the nation is going after. Sure, volume is quite attractive and favorable, but many times these broad keywords have no buying intent, they are typically informative search queries.

While these competitive and informative queries may be great for SEO as it builds value in the informational gathering phase, keep in mind that you’re competing against every single major competitor nationwide for 10 spots of real estate. Unless you have an expert SEO team on your side, the budget to fund this team, & the financial ability to withstand six or more months of no return, this is not a recommended strategy.

A campaign setup to fail in my professional opinion is one who expects to rank nationwide on Page One for the search query – AC units. This is a horribly competitive keyword to go after organically. If you Google this query, you will see major nationwide players plastered all over Page One. Paid is for another day as there are clear exceptions to this rule as we’ve found Google PLA’s (product listing ads) to skyrocket ROI as well.

If ROI is your goal, take the path of least resistance. Based on our large data sample in this specific example, we found that long-tail keywords were performing the best.

A majority of these queries defined exactly what the user wanted. There was no question about it. As an example, the search queries which converted the highest in this SEO campaign utilized brand + product + for sale.Another winner was brand + product + prices. Chances are if they are defining their query with “for sale” or “prices” they are in the market to buy. A sheer number game, the search volume is far less, but you now have real buyers viewing your products.

The data revealed the interest of those searches and the intent. Some of the clear benefits were longer time on site, more pages per visit, lowest bounce rate, and most importantly, more conversions.

The beauty of this strategy is with hundreds and hundreds of products, along with proper on-page optimization, there was plenty of profitable opportunities that were overlooked. There is no need to wait 6+ months to possibly get rankings for informative queries. Gains were lightning fast, and more importantly, so was ROI.

I strongly recommend you follow this logic to acquire laser targeted visitors who want to buy your products today. Not tomorrow.